Making "Real World" Problems Feel More Real

Third week of school, and I am feeling more and more satisfied with the amount of problems on which students have been working. Starting with my Geometry classes working on the great transversal tape and sticky activity that I found on the wonderful problem based learning curriculum maps (that I adore exploring). The activity didn't go quite as planned because I wasn't able to make copies of the handouts, but the students worked well none the less.

Those Geometry classes also had fun tackling some logic puzzles as we started talking about forming proofs and deductive reasoning. I was very thankful that my wife and I were able to visit her grandparents last weekend, and while there her grandmother gave me a book titled "The Brain Game." The book has 27 intelligence tests "that will reveal your unique abilities" like an IQ test. 

When I first saw it, I instantly thought of the possible problems and tasks I could pull from for the students, and thinking about the proof lessons coming up, I was look at the logic tests for some gems. One of the puzzles involved blue wombats, and it was a nice starter before we started proving angle relationships.

Moving to the Algebra 1 classes, I tried my hand at implementing a 3 Act task today with a Pepsi Points task  that I also found using those wonderful curriculum maps. I am looking forward to talking with the kids on Monday about the court case involving the person who tried to redeem pepsi points for a jet, and today they were really into estimating how much things cost and starting to figure out how many points it would take to get the jet. This was also a fun task because I got to talk about my experience with my dad riding in his van and stopping on the side of the rode to pick up pepsi bottles for the caps, so that he could redeem the points for stuff.

The fun did not end with Algebra, thankfully, as my seventh graders got to work on a problem about designing a model of the solar system, a problem about McDonalds, and a problem about the Curiosity Rover. They were working with exponent properties and scientific notation, and problems about space and the McDonald's serving 1% of the world's population seemed to fit. I loved showing them pictures of some really cool planets and stars, and they were really interested in how the Curiosity Rover landed. Infecting kids with the wonders of space explorations is my favorite past time. The fun again came in when I was able to relate the problems to experiences from my life. They seemed to enjoy some funny stories from my childhood when my mom worked as a manager at McDonald's, and I would play around the store in the freezer, in the drive through (scrounging for dropped change for a small fry), and wearing the headsets listening to the drive through orders. One particular group of girls found the idea of a car coming through the drive through while I was looking for change quite funny.

I started thinking after having the chance to share the stories about myself to my students that being able to connect these problems to my life really seemed to help make the work we were doing more meaningful. The students weren't just working through problems from some foreign book, or even good problems that aren't related to anything. Not only were students given an opportunity to work on interesting and challenging problems, they were able to see these problems as something more than just a math problem. Through telling my little stories, I felt that I was able to make these "real world problems" more real.

Train Speed

While working next to the train tracks in West Virginia, I was lucky enough to see three trains go by. It's possible that it was the same train going by three times.

At any rate, I was wondering, how fast was the train moving, so I took a video as it went down the tracks. 

That would be my Act 1, and from here the students would go about figuring out how fast the train was moving.

I could see this problem being used in a unit about rates and unit co versions. I think it could seve as a nice quick activity to get students thinking and working. 

There are a lot of angles to solving this problem. They could find the carts per second and convert to miles per hour, or they could see how long the driveway is and find out how long it takes a cart to travel that distance.

I might try to give them the original video file and let them manipulate to find the time from there.  

What would you do with this video, and what else have you done that's similar?